The Beirut Bombshell

Sideswipe crashes, intense eyes, magical reality, ruins, worthy adversaries, humans who acknowledge that they are animals, revolution, the sun

Dogma, doormats, stuff that doesn't smell like anything, the legacy of Robert Moses, most words that start with mono, except for monopod and monocle

Beirut fell in love with roller skating at a very young age and dreamed of playing roller derby when she saw it on Saturday morning television in the early 80s. She spent her youth avoiding team sports, instead playing bass and drums in rock bands and making half-hearted attempts to skateboard. As an adult, she became obsessed with hiking and biking in odd corners of the universe. In January 2008, she hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. She began playing roller derby in February 2007.

Beirut moved to New York City in 2009 after spending a decade as a reporter at an upstate daily newspaper, where she covered beats ranging from crime and local government to arts and entertainment. A lifelong champion of the independent press, she's now working on her master's in Media, Culture and Communication and plans to work in media and arts empowerment. She's a big fan of intentional community and roller derby's "by the skaters for the skaters" ethic and hopes more people will adopt it as an organizational model.

She's a voracious world traveler and has been to 16 countries, as well as 46 of the U.S. states.  She hopes to live somewhere in Latin America at some point in the future, where she would like to start a roller derby league and have lots of goats and cats.

When she's not skating or doing school work, Beirut spends her time exploring New York City, playing drums and making art.

Click here to read Thomas Gerbasi's profile of The Beirut Bombshell from November 2010.